Modi Govt's Defence of Operation Sindoor Leaves Most Questions Unanswered

New Delhi: The Narendra Modi government’s defence of Operation Sindoor at the end of the 16-hour debate in the Lok Sabha on Tuesday (July 29) turned out to be an elaborate attempt in infusing a renewed energy among its Hindutva supporters – much more than an official exercise in answering concerns and questions raised by the opposition and critics in the aftermath of Pahalgam terror attack and Operation Sindoor. 

Leader after leader in the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) camp who rose up to defend and celebrate Operation Sindoor hit out at the Congress for not adequately rising to the occasion, and even faltering, in historical instances of Pakistani aggression, in an effort to distinguish the Modi government from its previous counterparts. 

Almost everyone, especially the union home minister Amit Shah, employed their familiar belligerence that frequently ridiculed the opposition benches as alleged supporters of Pakistan and Islam, and reasserted themselves – directly and indirectly – as puritanical Hindu nationalists.  

At the end of it, their televised speeches clearly seemed to address those who had felt betrayed after Operation Sindoor was called off by US president Donald Trump, and who had subsequently expressed their public anger and disappointment over the sudden announcement of ceasefire at a time when top leaders in the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and a large section of pliant media were incessantly whipping up war hysteria.

Adding some authenticity to the celebratory mood over the claimed success of Operation Sindoor, Shah set the ball rolling by dropping a bombshell when he announced that the three alleged militants who were killed in a joint military operation in Jammu and Kashmir on July 28, 2025 were actually those who had carried out the heinous Pahalgam terror attack. The announcement came as a fillip for the treasury benches, which padded Shah’s speech with similar anecdotes that pointed towards Congress’s alleged failures. 

Two out of six

However, the debate could clear the air around only two facets of Operation Sindoor, and left other questions hanging amidst the tangential explanations by the government. 

One, prime minister Narendra Modi, union home minister Shah, external affairs minister S. Jaishankar, and defence minister Rajnath Singh, all of them repeated that Operation Sindoor was meant to be a targeted attack on terror headquarters in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, and not an escalatory military warfare.

Once the targets were met on May 6, 2025, including an unprecedented airstrike on terror hubs deep inside the Pakistani territory, the union government decided to end it, the ministers said. They also said that India resumed its military operations on the intervening night of May 9-10 only because of the provocative attacks by Pakistan, in which the Indian security forces could cripple many military facilities of Pakistan. Such was the retaliation on May 9-10 that some of the military facilities of Pakistan are “still recovering in the ICU”, the prime minister said. 

The assertion clearly contradicts the war hysteria that was whipped by Hindutva forces, including many BJP leaders, and a large section of television media that even went on to claim falsely that the Indian security forces were moving aggressively towards capturing important cities and strategic territories of Pakistan. 

Once and for all, the union government indicated to their supporters that they should be content with the astounding success of the calibrated attacks on Pakistan and which is what Operation Sindoor was. 

Two, with Shah’s announcement of Operation Mahadev – the joint military action in which three alleged militants and footsoldiers of Pahalgam attack were killed – the government broke its silence on the question about whether the government could bring the Pahalgam attackers to task or not.

Shah’s claim that coincidentally came on the second day of the debate on Operation Sindoor managed to silence a section of the criticism that it faced. Although the government had claimed that the Operation Sindoor neutralised around 100 dreaded terrorists, it was tightlipped over the last three months on whether it could capture or kill the attackers in Pahalgam or not. 

Other concerns remain unaddressed

Barring these two facets, however, the government did not provide any convincing answers to the questions raised in the political row over the Pahalgam attack, and chose to avoid those with a counter-attack on the opposition. 

The first and foremost concern raised was Trump’s repeated assertion that he mediated a truce between India and Pakistan, while unilaterally announcing a ceasefire even before India had said so. The Modi government stuck to its position that Operation Sindoor brought Pakistan to its knees to the extent that it felt forced to call upon India to end its attacks. But be it Modi, Shah, Jaishankar, or Rajnath Singh, everybody avoided the concern like plague, not one uttering a single word to directly address it. 

The closest that the government came to addressing was Jaishankar who said that there was no call between Trump and Modi between April 22 and June 17, and that several countries which called India during Operation Sindoor were categorically told that “there will be no mediation”.

Modi on Tuesday also reiterated what Jaishankar had said earlier – that the US vice president J.D. Vance had called on Modi on May 9 warning him of an imminent Pakistani attack on India. However, both the external affairs minister and Modi said that Vance was told that India will appropriately respond to such an attack. 

The opposition naturally stuck their necks out on the point, and asked why if the government was right, then Trump would go on to claim credit for engineering a ceasefire between the two South Asian countries. Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi went ahead to challenge the prime minister to say that Trump was lying. But the government remained cautious through the debate. 

Secondly, the government also evaded answering the question raised on loss of Indian fighter jets during Operation Sindoor. While most leaders ridiculed and bullied the opposition for raising the question, with some even labelling opposition leaders as Pakistani supporters, only Rajnath Singh directly addressed the question but provided no answers. 

His response was rather intriguing, where he schooled the opposition for asking the wrong question. 

“I want to tell the opposition that if you have to ask a question, then ask this question: was Operation Sindoor successful? The answer is, yes. If you have a question to ask, ask this: Have the terrorists who wiped the sindoor off our sisters and daughters been dealt with by our forces in Operation Sindoor, eliminating their masters? The answer is, yes. If you have a question to ask, ask this: were any of our brave soldiers harmed in this operation? The answer is, no, none of our soldiers were harmed,” he said.

Also Read: How Kashmir’s Land Politics Is Being Dangerously Exploited From All Sides

He then went on to say something that appeared to be an admission of the claim that India had indeed incurred some losses. “The result matters in the outcome of any examination. If a child scores good marks in an exam, then for us, those marks should matter. We should not focus on the fact that their pencil broke or their pen got lost during the exam. Ultimately, the result matters, and the result is that during Operation Sindoor, our armed forces fully achieved the objectives they had set,” he said.

The other two crucial concerns were met by the government’s overindulgence in whataboutery and aggressive talk against the Congress. It provided no explanations on why in spite of the Modi government’s claims of cornering Pakistan as a terror-sponsoring state at the global stage, Pakistan could secure loans worth billions from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and Asian Development Bank (ADB) soon after Operation Sindoor.

The speakers from the government also did not provide any explanation on why the Pakistani military chief field marshal  Asim Munir received an invitation on US Army Day and a dinner invitation from Trump recently. It also lacked any explanation on the Chinese help that Pakistan received in the aftermath of Pahalgam attack, or why was Pakistan not condemned by any country after the Pahalgam attack. 

Ministers in the government only pointed out alleged diplomatic failures during the Congress governments. 

Similarly, not even a single explanation was given on the opposition's accusation of severe intelligence failure during the Pahalgam attack. Congress and other leaders of opposition had asked a pinpointed question: How could terrorists walk in and easily walk out of the Baisaran valley to first carry out a deadly attack on innocent Indian civilians and then escape from the situation?

Drowning out some of the legitimate concerns raised by opposition

The government also did not say anything about lack of adequate security arrangement and emergency health measures in the touristy Baisaran valley when the attack was carried out.

The Modi government clearly deployed aggression, Hindutva nationalism, and rhetoric to drown out some of these legitimate concerns raised by opposition. Instead of finally putting the concerns to rest in the parliament, the government chose to keep the pot boiling. The government clearly used the debate to placate its angry and anxious supporters. 

In doing so, however, it may have, consciously or unconsciously, admitted to its supporters and possible sympathisers that okay, Operation Sindoor may not have yielded their desired outcomes, and that there were external and internal factors at play, but Modi and the BJP were still better than the Congress.

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